Van Zyl-Cillié Maria, Demirtas Derya, Hans Erwin
Faculty of Behaviourial Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands.
School of Industrial Engineering, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa.
Health Syst (Basingstoke). 2022 Jan 9;12(1):3-21. doi: 10.1080/20476965.2021.2018362. eCollection 2023.
Waiting time in healthcare is a significant problem that occurs across the world and often has catastrophic effects. There are various terms used for waiting time ("sojourn", "throughput" etc.) and there is no consensus on how these terms are defined. Ambiguous definitions of waiting time make it difficult to compare and measure the problems related to waiting times and delays in healthcare. We present a systematic search and review of the Operations Research and Management Science (ORMS) literature on delays in healthcare services. We search for articles from 2004 to 2019 and base our search strategy on a well-known healthcare planning and control decision taxonomy. An important step towards reducing the ambiguity in the definitions is to distinguish between and . We provide clear definitions and examples of access time and waiting time, and we classify our search results according to three categories: article type, healthcare service investigated and ORMS technique used to solve the delay problem. We find that half of the ORMS research on the waiting and access time problem is done on Ambulatory Care services. We provide tables for each healthcare service that highlight key definitions, the techniques that are used most often and the healthcare environment where the research is done. This research highlights the significant ORMS research that is done on access and waiting time in healthcare as well as the remaining research opportunities. Moreover, it provides a common language for the ORMS community to solve critical waiting time issues in healthcare.
医疗保健中的等待时间是一个全球性的重大问题，常常会产生灾难性影响。对于等待时间有各种不同的术语（如“逗留时间”“吞吐量”等），而且对于这些术语如何定义并没有达成共识。等待时间的定义不明确使得难以比较和衡量与医疗保健中的等待时间及延误相关的问题。我们对运筹学与管理科学（ORMS）文献中有关医疗服务延误的内容进行了系统的检索和综述。我们检索了2004年至2019年的文章，并将检索策略基于一个著名的医疗保健规划与控制决策分类法。减少定义模糊性的一个重要步骤是区分 和 。我们给出了就诊时间和等待时间的明确定义及示例，并根据文章类型、所研究的医疗服务以及用于解决延误问题的ORMS技术这三个类别对检索结果进行分类。我们发现，ORMS关于等待时间和就诊时间问题的研究有一半是针对门诊护理服务进行的。我们为每种医疗服务提供了表格，突出了关键定义、最常使用的技术以及开展研究的医疗环境。这项研究凸显了ORMS在医疗保健就诊时间和等待时间方面所做的重要研究以及其余的研究机会。此外，它为ORMS领域提供了一种通用语言，以解决医疗保健中关键的等待时间问题。
